Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.CitrixXenServer and modern virtualization2017-09-28T17:55:19.728ZOur organization utilized XenServer to replace VMWare ESXi. We have consolidated all physical servers to just 3 hypervisors and manage the environment with XoA. We currently have 30 VMs running in our infrastructure. We utilize Windows 2016 and 2012 R2 along with a few instances of Linux. Each department uses an individual server which has improved the speed and delivery of IT services to our staff.,Resource Monitoring is a good and I am able to monitor my entire infrastructure whether I'm using my iPhone remotely or while on any company-issued laptop to ensure our services run at peak efficiency.
CLI - the command line is not hard to use. It can take a little time to get used to the commands but once you have them down managing the environment from the GUI or CLI is pretty easy.
Backups are very easy to start and manage with XenCenter or XoA. Keeping business DR scenarios achievable.,Better support for USB devices (which is a weak point of most Hypervisors)
More native iPhone/Android apps to monitor the environment
Better reports for an insight of how healthy the environment is,10,The best positive impact XenServer had on our business was the fact we didn't have to purchase a room full of physical servers to handle our workloads. This alone saved us thousands of dollars on hardware and software purchases, the cooling cost went down, power cost went down and management for the environment was centralized and easier to maintain.,VMware ESXi,QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions,100,2,Virtual Machine DR/BR
Consolidation
Reduction in repair times for most issues due to only having to manage fewer servers.,We were able to utlize RDP to let slower, older donated laptops remote in and breathe life into aging hardware.
The speed in which we can reboot servers was reduced from minutes to seconds
Being able to take my virtual machine and go to another different site and transfer it with little effort.,For VDI,10,Yes,Price
Product Features
Product Usability,Stick with XenServer and invest more time in learning how to make pools and vswitches work for smaller environments.Kristopher LeslieXenServer is Awesome!2017-03-24T15:11:04.371ZXenServer is used for the whole organisation and hosts all the companies VM's. It is very helpful to manage and troubleshoot all existing servers. It provides capabilities to monitor all servers. Creating new VM's using XenServer is seemingly very easy for the process is straight forward and one can easily follow through.,Provides visibility of all the VM's and one can tell when any of the server's are offline.
The functionality to re-boot a VM is easy and quick
It is secure and can be accessed remotely.,Disaster recovery is difficult to use,10,The company saved a lot of money in terms of buying physical servers by using Xenserver it was easily to create VM's
It is easy to use and manage, therefore saved on costs of support.Evelyn NakibuukaOpen source hypervisor, free license and advanced features2016-11-23T19:58:53.068ZWe are using Xenserver as the principal hypervisor of our private cloud that offers infrastructure as a service to the academic community of the University of Sao Paulo and other public institutes of Brazil. This private cloud has 480 servers (9800 CPUs, 5TB RAM, 15PB storage) and it is used for scientific processing and many other services like web services, email systems, a social collaboration systems.,Free advanced resources: Live migration, live storage migration, snapshots, open switch/vxlan. Others hypervisors offer the same but are paid.
It is fully compatible with CloudStack and OpenStack.
Supports paravirtualization (PVM) and hardware virtual machines (HVM).
It is open-source and easy to troubleshoot.,The snapshots management still presents problems, especially in environments with several virtual machines.
The virtual memory management is still weak if compared with other hypervisors.
There isn't a central server for the management of physical hosts. XenCenter is a client that is not good because it demands so much memory and CPU to execute simple tasks in environments with several VMs.,9,Xenserver is easy to learn. We paid for support only for installation and deployment in the first three years, and now our team has the knowledge to solve most problems.
Low CAPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.
But paid support is necessary to solve critical problems. The open source community is not enough. Actually, we have difficulty solving some bugs without paying for support.
Medium OPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.,,VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, Kernel-based Virtual Machine,3000,8,Scientific processing
Optimization of IT resource usage
Agility in the IT resource allocation process,Provide virtual desktops in the cloud computingStênio Pereira FilhoXenServer Vs ?2015-10-16T17:13:11.210ZWe are using XenServer for all our virtualization of servers company-wide. It allows us to leverage our hardware and run multiple VMs on each physical server.,Low cost. Support is much cheaper than the alternatives.
Much simpler to implement and manage than other hypervisors.
Good performance on all the VMs.,Front line support form off shore has been challenging lately. Need a better escalation path for issues.
Upgrades can be difficult at times. Not always super smooth.,8,Much less need to buy servers.
Power usage down.,Greg DePrattXenServer reviewed by an avid Citrix and VDI engineer2015-10-07T21:33:53.721ZThe XenServer workloads I have set up and currently provide are primarily for clients. These workloads cover anything from an IT lab, VDI and Server workloads for the entire data center. It is a mixed use hypervisor in most environments where it is placed for a purpose (such as VDI) at a cost savings and management supplement due to its ease of use.,Manages upgrades to the pool of hypervisor hosts with relative ease through a console (if licensed).
Makes it easy to create machine templates and clones and move them around within the pool of hosts.
Handles failures reasonably well through the use of the pool database copied on each host,Adding or presenting additional storage to the host can often be a task that is far more involved than competitive products.
The product can require reboots more frequently than competitors due to the DOM kernel getting "hung up".
Sometimes when a virtual machine is deleted it still leaves behind orphaned vdisks.
Recovering from the loss of a host can sometimes cause virtual machines to require lengthy command prompt scripting to fix so they can be powered back on from another host.,7,Positively, the ability to implement a XenServer pool for VDI workloads is a fast process. Thus a faster project getting into the pilot phase.
Negatively, XenServer has caused outages at client sites due to the pool master failing and a subsequent member not taking over properly (VDI).
Negatively, XenServer has failed to allow easy addition of storage or expansion to a SAN drive which required an outage to occur in order to properly see the new free space for growth.,VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, Oracle VM VirtualBox and VMware Workstation,XenApp, XenDesktop, RES One Suite,,3,Virtual Desktop infrastructure
Server workloads for branch offices
Server workloads for an entire company
Disaster Recovery capabilities for failed hardware,Allow access to GPUs for graphical workloads within a virtual desktop implementation
Cross site DR through use of SAN replication and some third part tools for backup management
Creating a lab environment within a production footprint without requiring excessive processing or power for what typically requires dedicated equipment,Replacing entire data centers
Replacing all compute within a branch office
Fast deployment of compute resources for acquisitions or new locations opening,6,No,Price
Product Usability
Prior Experience with the Product
Vendor Reputation
Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Third-party Reviews,Looking into the future many organizations are interested in how to begin or further leverage an investment in the cloud. The could mean Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, IBM or another solution provider to be able to offload the management and initial purchase required to provide the compute needed for their environment. The ability to move a datacenter effortlessly and expand or contract with little to no loss of investment is a huge proposition with evaluating this type of workload platform.,Professional services company,Yes,Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled,Incompatible hardware, check the HCL but also check with the vendor
Storage not being visible due to lack of zoning, or correct zoning
Networks not trunked to the appropriate switch ports for the virtual networks creates an unnecessary delay,8,Self-taught,3,,It is relatively easy to learn, the install with current releases makes things even easier at the time of installation and initial configuration. There are some Linux commands that you'll have to learn for some tasks, but the documentation and searching the Internet will allow you to get down the right path with relative ease.,6,Ensure you review the HCL (hardware compatibility list) prior to planning to install XenServer on a host system (hcl.xensource.com). Ensure you are leveraging hard disks for installing XenServer (doesn't support SD cards - at least last time I've checked, which could be outdated info). Use like hardware (until the next release 6.5 SP2?).,No - we have not done any customization to the interface,Some - we have added small pieces of custom code,I haven't seen any need to customize XenServer for the environments I've worked within. It is worth mentioning that XenServer is generalized by its implementation by CITRIX; however, Amazon uses the source code from XenSource to build and manage AWS which shows the ability to have a fully customized setup which is also quite robust.,7,No,On one incident occasion there was a complete lack of compatibility with a converged network adapter for a vendor which was stated to be fine with workloads on XenServer. This became an issue and incorrect information when a VDI environment was built but there was a lack of ability to stream the virtual disk image leveraging Citrix Provisioning Services. Citrix provided incredible support involving the hardware vendor and lining up options to replace the incompatible card to ensure project success and positive momentum. At this same time update drivers for XenServer were shared and made a world of difference in driving success with the project.,Managing virtual machines and adjusting the view within the XenCenter console is very easy
Creating a new virtual machine is easy
Adding and browsing storage repositories is easy,Changing or updating storage repositories is very difficult.
Bringing up a failed hosts virtual machines can occasionally require some cumbersome scripting or command line work.
It is difficult to manage the virtual switches.,No,7,7,6,7,System Center Operations Manager
XenDesktop
XenApp,Monitoring Solutions
Networking Solutions,File import/export
Single Signon
API (e.g. SOAP or REST),6,Dont forget to look beyond the big names in solutions for integration capabilities, there are numerous smaller companies doing great feature integration. Use that search engine!,9,9,Working as a partner there wasn't any need to negotiate. Options for adding software assurance or support are available, typically with a limited period included.,No special advice here, learn about the product, have licensing laid out simply and bullet point the features of interest. Ensure you choose only what you need, or what you want. No need to upgrade or go up a level if it doesn't fit.,Yes,64-bit Kernel, drastically improves scalability and performance
Improved support for vGPU options
Ability to create VM's with much larger virtual hard disks,More supported GPU options
Storage connectivity options improved or augmented (SMB option!)
Further integration with virtual desktop environments (XenDesktop),Yes,NoVerified User

Our organization utilized XenServer to replace VMware ESXi. We have consolidated all physical servers to just 3 hypervisors and manage the environment with XoA. We currently have 30 VMs running in our infrastructure. We utilize Windows 2016 and 2012 R2 along with a few instances of Linux. Each department uses an individual server which has improved the speed and delivery of IT services to our staff.

Resource Monitoring is a good and I am able to monitor my entire infrastructure whether I'm using my iPhone remotely or while on any company-issued laptop to ensure our services run at peak efficiency.

CLI - the command line is not hard to use. It can take a little time to get used to the commands but once you have them down managing the environment from the GUI or CLI is pretty easy.

Backups are very easy to start and manage with XenCenter or XoA. Keeping business DR scenarios achievable.

XenServer is well suited for all scenarios for deployment for a modern infrastructure. The weak link it has is of course for classic physical hardware that has key fobs or other telephony cards which aren't properly supported in a virtualized environment. Even if you have one physical server, virtualizing is the best practice to do.

XenServer is used for the whole organisation and hosts all the companies VM's. It is very helpful to manage and troubleshoot all existing servers. It provides capabilities to monitor all servers. Creating new VM's using XenServer is seemingly very easy for the process is straight forward and one can easily follow through.

We are using Xenserver as the principal hypervisor of our private cloud that offers infrastructure as a service to the academic community of the University of Sao Paulo and other public institutes of Brazil. This private cloud has 480 servers (9800 CPUs, 5TB RAM, 15PB storage) and it is used for scientific processing and many other services like web services, email systems, a social collaboration systems.

The snapshots management still presents problems, especially in environments with several virtual machines.

The virtual memory management is still weak if compared with other hypervisors.

There isn't a central server for the management of physical hosts. XenCenter is a client that is not good because it demands so much memory and CPU to execute simple tasks in environments with several VMs.

Xenserver is a great hypervisor, with advanced features, open-source and free. This is possible by support from Citrix. It works perfectly in cloud environments and standalone systems. If you need to create an environment to execute virtual machines to scientific processing, XenServer is well suited. However, we are having difficulty managing environments that demand high disk I/O and net I/O too. In this case, Hyper-V and ESxi work better.

The XenServer workloads I have set up and currently provide are primarily for clients. These workloads cover anything from an IT lab, VDI and Server workloads for the entire data center. It is a mixed use hypervisor in most environments where it is placed for a purpose (such as VDI) at a cost savings and management supplement due to its ease of use.

I feel XenServer is well suited for VDI based workloads at least within the Citrix product portfolio as it is extremely easy to set up and manage. It is also a reasonably well suited platform for smaller data centers which require less complexity and monitoring. Workloads requiring the usage of shared GPU are well suited for XenServer.

The product is less well suited for large enterprise data centers. However, new versions are bringing features to allow the hypervisor to contend. Complex virtual networking environments may not be well suited for XenServer.